Linen Tough As History

In Julie Chevalier’s Linen Tough As History Frank O’Hara meets Julia Gillard on election night for lime spiders at Fairy Meadow beach: “she’s hurrying toward him as fast as she can with the sole of her orthopaedic boot built up so high…” Chevalier’s poetry is fresh and feisty, as she navigates contemporary tensions between the cosmopolitan and parochial, stretching from Sydney down the escarpment to Wollongong’.

— Keri Glastonbury

Julie Chevalier was born in New Jersey and came to Sydney in 1965. Her wry and gritty poetry and short fiction have appeared in journals and anthologies, most recently in the Best Australian Poetry 2011 and Best Australian Short Stories 2011. Her short story collection Permission to Lie was published in 2011. Her collection Darger: his girls, a sequence of poems about the life of eccentric Chicago artist Henry Darger, won the 2011 Alec Bolton Prize for best unpublished manuscript and is also published by Puncher & Wattmann. She is the co-editor of Small Wonder, an anthology of Australian prose poems and short fiction.